There’s a house in New Orleans, in the Garden district
that has slowly fallen into disrepair. It’s the residence of the core of the
Mayfair family – the Mayfair witches
For generations the Talamasca has watched the Mayfair
witches since their distant ancestor was burned at the stake in Scotland. Her descendants
since then have passed on her dangerous legacy – a magical gift and the Lasher.
A spirit of ever increasing power and dangerous, unknown motives – a creature
that definitely has blood on its hands even as it put gold in the Mayfair
pockets
And now, reaching the 13th generation of
Mayfair witches, all that knowledge over the centuries may finally be needed to
reveal the Lasher’s eventual plan.
Some books are long
Some books are very long
Some books are very very long indeed
Some books are “ye gods WHYYY?!” long
And then there’s Witching Hour which is much much longer than that.
It’s not just the length of the book – and it is a
mammoth 1,200 pages – it’s how long the book feels as well. Some books can be
really wrong and you still dive through them because they’re awesome – they
feel short. And some short books drag on because they feel long with dense,
awful writing and lack of any real pacing. Well, this was an incredibly long
book THAT FELT EVEN LONGER!
The writing is so dense and so boring and so repetitive that it is an achievement to get through. It has to be said about Anne Rice that she is good at establishing time and place with evocative description – and she certainly does that in this book. But she doesn’t do it once – every place needs this description dozens of times, over and over the same points, the same places, the same times are described again and again in really long winded terms. Any evocative sense of setting is lost in the sheer overwhelming wave of unnecessary verbiage.
There’s a lot of grossly unnecessary detail. I struggled
to start this book because we were treated to such a long winded, unnecessary
analysis of Michael’s life before we were ever given any reason to connect to
this man that I nearly gave up right there. I have no idea why we need the best
part of 100 pages to describe Michael’s past or what it added to the book. But
the same thing happens several times – Petyr can’t just be an agent of the
Talamasca, we need to know his life story first. Some random agent in the 20s
couldn’t just be a Talamasca agent, no, we needed to know his childhood, his
history, how he joined the Talamasca, who he worked with… so much information
for so little purpose. We can’t just get the story of Rita Mae, childhood
friend of Deidre – no, we need to include far too many details about Rita Mae
as well and I have absolutely no idea why I should care, why this is relevant
or why I am having to read this.
To make it worse, the repetitiveness comes in as well.
Rita Mae tells her story, then we have it repeated in Aaron’s narrative. A
doctor tells his story about Deidre – which doesn’t really add anything unique
– and then that gets repeated by Aaron. A priest tells his story, a nun tells
her story – and then all these stories get repeated again. And these stories
themselves are an exercise in redundancy. To show us how meticulous and creepy
the Talastalkers are, we get the same information from several different
sources to really drive home just how assiduously the Talastalkers have left no
stone unturned in their quest to be the creepiest of creepers. So, yet MORE
repetition!
And let’s have a swipe at the Talamasca here – because
I’m still somewhat at a loss as to what exactly they’re doing? Trying to stop
the Lasher? Well you’ve had 3 centuries of doing absolutely nothing towards
that goal. The mere thought of the Lasher makes them cower in their beds. Ok,
is it to help the family? Well you had evidence of generations of incest and
multiple murders and didn’t feel the need to intervene. So is it just
curiosity? Because that seems like a really dubious justification for centuries
of riffling through someone’s rubbish and stealing their medical records. It’s
not that curiosity isn’t a real motive – it is a very reasonable motive. But if
that is the motive then the Talamasca are severely creepy, entitled and
unethical people who feel they can intrude on someone’s life to this degree for
the sake of their own nosiness. Hence my reference to Talastalkers.
